As EU leaders gather in Brussels for the last EU summit of the year, EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy said that '2013 has been a year of progress and hard work is starting to pay off'.
Heads of state and government are meeting in Brussels on 19 and 20 December for a European Council summit. Security and defence and the economic and monetary union are the main topics on the agenda.

More than five years after the financial crisis struck, Europe is about to finalise one its most ambitious reforms since the launch of the euro: the banking union.
The plan aims to keep tax-payers from bailing out troubled banks. It includes setting up a 55 billion euro fund, financed by the banking industry, over 10 years. A new European agency would also be created, which would decide when and how failing banks would be closed.

Negotiators from the European Union’s 28 member states agreed on a Single Resolution Mechanism to save bankrupt banks on Wednesday, putting together a central piece of the EU’s banking union puzzle which aims at sparing taxpayers from bailing out failed banks in the future.

Questions over how far the European Central Bank (ECB) should control Europe’s banks dominated yesterday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers and look set to continue today (15 October) as member states push back against the Commission’s powers under the new European Semester.

Europe took a significant step forward in its ambitions to create a single banking framework for the eurozone on Thursday (12 September) after EU lawmakers granted new powers to the European Central Bank to oversee banks in the currency bloc.

European finance ministers agreed on Thursday (26 June) to force investors and wealthy savers to share the costs of future bank failures, moving to put an end to unpopular taxpayer-funded bailouts that prompted outrage during the financial crisis.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and his team of EU commissioners travelled to Dublin on Thursday to mark the start of the Irish presidency.
Prime Minister Enda Kenny wants to use his presidency term to clinch a deal on restructuring Ireland's bank debt and successfully exiting the bailout programme.
Banking supervision and reaching a deal on the EU budget will also be amongst Dublin's priorities.

Ahead of the 6th EU Summit in a year, finance ministers are meeting on Wednesday to table a compromise on creating a single supervisor responsible for all eurozone banks.
The so-called “Single Supervisory Mechanism” is seen as the first pillar of a full European banking Union.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said on Thursday that he will unveil a banking union proposal on September 12th. The proposal will coincide with his "State of the Union" speech at the European Parliament, and will outline a plan that could see the European Central Bank increasing its powers of supervision and intervention.
The banking union is expected to focus on euro-zone members, as non-eurozone countries are likely to opt-out.

The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled a new proposal that will protect taxpayers from banks that go bust. Under the new draft legislation, shareholders and creditors would be forced to accept losses of troubled-banks instead of using public-funded bailouts.
The new plan also allows member states to take control of crisis-hit banks and replace the management. Each institution would also have to create a special fund dedicated specifically for potential future crises.